MEDIA; Mainstream TV Bets on 'Gross-Out' Humor

This summer the movies have been filled with crude language, bathroom humor and sex scenes that include the defiling of an apple pie. Brace yourself for the fall television season.

The trend that has turned vulgarity and bodily functions into big-screen entertainment will spread to mainstream television in September, with the premiere of a Fox Network comedy called ''Action.'' The pilot contains the first all-out barrage of four-letter words ever unleashed on broadcast television -- all of them bleeped out, but easy enough to lip read -- and such moments as a prostitute putting her hand down the trousers of a movie star and a father discussing the size of his sex organ with his preteen daughter.

It is all part of what some television executives and social scientists see as the rapid disappearance of most taste and language restrictions in mass media, a trend fueled by shifting standards of what is socially acceptable -- and what, for the television industry, is deemed to be financially necessary.

As Doug Herzog, the president of Fox Entertainment put it: ''This is all happening because society is evolving and changing. But the bottom line is, people seem to be buying it.''

The main buyers, the audience at the center of this wave of what the industry calls gross-out entertainment, are boys and men under 25. Not only has this group established itself as the most loyal to Hollywood movies -- because of a desire to be the first to see the hip new film and a willingness to go back and see it several more times. It is the group favored by a long list of television advertisers.

As a result, never before have the age-old elements of adolescent male humor -- body functions, scatology and coarse language -- dominated such a broad swath of American popular culture. The reason is scarcity; younger males traditionally watch less television than any other group.

And yet this young male audience is willing to spend ''a lot of disposable income'' on entertainment, said Gene DeWitt, chairman of DeWitt Media, a firm that buys advertising time on television.

At the same time, many areas of entertainment, especially television, are being fragmented into smaller and smaller niches defined by gender, age and tastes. As a result, producers and programmers who formerly sought to smooth the roughest edges of comedy in order to reach as many viewers as possible without giving offense, now are free to target young men with the kind of entertainment they most enjoy: gross-out comedy.

''For adolescent males, there has always been an appeal in things they are told are not appropriate, and gross-out humor is one of those things,'' said Joanne Cantor, a professor of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin, who researches issues involving television and children.

This humor has disproportionate influence because young men serve as ''the barometer of new comedy,'' said Mr. Herzog, who before moving to the News Corporation's Fox unit was head of Comedy Central, owned by Time Warner Inc. and Viacom Inc., which gave the world that seminal gross-out series, the animated ''South Park'' (now one of the summer's leading gross-out movies). ''From David Letterman to Conan O'Brien to Chris Rock, young men found them first. A channel like Comedy Central is naturally going to build itself as a guy channel.''

More broadly, several executives suggested, the public has become desensitized to sexual and scatological material because of mass exposure to news stories like President Clinton's relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, with its open discussions of oral sex and cigars as sex toys.

In popular entertainment, this new freedom of raunchy expression has recently brought, in movies and on television, such previously uncontemplated sights and sounds as:

* A teen-ager using an apple pie to masturbate in the film ''American Pie.''

* A talk show host vomiting into a toilet on the ''Tom Green Show'' on the MTV network.

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Not every entertainment industry executive is willing to attribute all this to a hunt for free-spending, heavy-breathing young men. ''Before it's about getting young men, it's about getting anybody,'' said one senior Hollywood studio executive, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''There's a level of desperation to all this.''

But young men do seem to be a favorite quarry.

Even the scheduling of ''Action'' fits into the young-male entertainment cycle. Fox is putting it on Thursday night -- the biggest night on television for movie advertising, one of the most lucrative ad categories for television networks. And of course, many of the movies being advertised are aimed the same male audience that is the ''Action'' target.

Trying a similar strategy is another Viacom unit, UPN, which has the lowest Nielsen ratings of the six broadcast networks and is now trumpeting its desire to attract young males. The network has added three male-appeal shows for the fall season, including two hours of a professional wrestling free-for-all show called ''W.W.F. Smackdown'' -- on Thursdays, of course.

The senior studio executive who spoke of ''desperation'' for viewers also noted that ''every decade there is some television show that raises the bar'' on what is acceptable. A quarter-century ago it was ''Saturday Night Live''; in the mid-1980's it was ''Married With Children'' on Fox, and in the 1990's ''Seinfeld'' broke several rules, especially with an episode involving masturbation. But most executives agreed that the groundbreaking ''Seinfeld'' episode was handled with a sense of cleverness and even charm that seems to be lacking these days.

Some social critics and some television executives assign part of the blame to the Federal law requiring a V-chip censoring device in new television sets (all new sets must have it by January 2000), and the parallel development of a ratings system to label shows for age appropriateness and for violence, sex, foul language or suggestive dialogue. Though meant to protect children, the labels and blocking options, these critics say, give producers carte blanche on vulgar (or violent) content.

Some even worry that the labels will serve as magnets to attract children. Ms. Cantor, though, has found that the ''V'' itself is not the magnet.

''If you just say it's violent, that doesn't attract most kids,'' said Ms. Cantor, who has done extensive research on children's reaction to violence rating labels. ''But if you tell them they shouldn't watch it, or they're too young for it, that does.'' That pattern has yet to be adequately tested for other labels, she said.

Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington, cautioned that so-called male adolescent humor does not appeal only to boys. ''You hang out with some teen-agers today, and you'll hear young girls say things that would fry your hair,'' she said.

Mr. Herzog noted that the broadcast networks are held to a different standard than cable networks when to comes to foul language or sexual content, because the broadcasters are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. He pointed out that viewers seem to simply accept such things as four-letter words on cable channels.

As an example, he cited a moment from his days at Comedy Central, when an episode from ''South Park'' arrived so late it had to be rushed onto the air the same day. In the television version of ''South Park,'' the cartoon children frequently utter four-letter words, but they are bleeped, much in the way Fox is doing on ''Action.''

That night, when Mr. Herzog watched the new episode of ''South Park'' at his home, however, he heard one character utter the most common of sexual obscenities, which had gone unbleeped in the rush to complete the episode. He expected a flood of protests from viewers. ''We didn't even get one call,'' he said.

Similarly, last week during baseball's All-Star Home Run Derby, which was carried on the ESPN cable network, several players could clearly be heard shouting obscenities when they failed to drive a ball out of the park. Mr. Herzog surmised that if the event had been broadcast by NBC or Fox, hundreds of complaints would have been called in. ESPN reported no calls at all.

With ''Action,'' which was originally designed to play on HBO, Fox is clearly trying to compete with cable's standards of vulgarity and sexual explicitness. And of course, the network would love to see the show establish itself as a Thursday hit with young male viewers.

And if ''Action'' works? Imitation has always been the sincerest form of television, as the comedian Fred Allen said long ago.

''There's no point in moralizing whether this is a good or bad thing,'' said the advertising executive, Mr. DeWitt. ''Television is a business whose purpose is gathering audiences.''